Bitcoin
Japan’s DMM Bitcoin Claims Over ¥48 Billion in Cryptocurrencies Lost
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin said on Friday that it had lost 4,502.9 bitcoins, worth about ¥48.2 billion ($308 million), in what the company called an “unauthorized leak.”
It did not give details on how the incident occurred or whether an outside party was involved, but said it was investigating and restricted some services in response.
Cryptocurrency companies are frequent targets of hacks and cyberattacks, although losses of this scale are rare.
DMM Bitcoin said it would replace customers’ lost bitcoin deposits with the help of other companies in the group.
The Financial Services Agency demanded that the company investigate the incident, NHK said.
Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of crypto research firm Elliptic, said that if the DMM loss was a theft, it would be the eighth largest crypto theft of all time, based on exchange rates at the time it occurred. .
It would be the biggest since the $477 million hack suffered by FTX in November 2022, he added.
Crypto news outlet CoinDesk said DMM’s loss was the second biggest the region has ever experienced, after $530 million worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen from Japanese exchange Coincheck in 2018.
Around $1.7 billion was stolen from various cryptocurrency platforms last year, crypto research firm Chainalysis said.